Question

Change droplet OS

Posted on December 16, 2020
Debian 10 CentOS 8 DigitalOcean Droplets
Asked by mywritingblock

With the announcement that Centos is moving to Centos Stream, and support for Centos 8 will end in 2021, is there a safe way to migrate the files (webserver, sql server) to a different OS. The goal is to move from Centos to Debian or one of the other servers with little to no downtime. What would be the safest way to do this? Thank you in advance

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awww • December 20, 2020

Accepted Answer

You can also run the following three commands (as root) and migrate your server to CentOS Stream:

dnf -y install centos-release-stream
dnf -y swap centos-{linux,stream}-repos
dnf -y distro-sync

That’s it.

Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• December 16, 2020

Hi there @mywritingblock,

I personally believe that the safest way to do this is to follow these steps here:

Spin up a new Droplet with the desired OS
Install the necessary services (webserver, sql server, etc.)
After that using rsync for example copy over your files and migrate your databases
Then test your website and server fully to make sure that everything is working as expected
Finally change your DNS to point to the new Droplet

Regards, Bobby